Agenda Newsletter - June 29-July 1, 2007

Last year, Film Forum revived Jean-Pierre Melville’s brilliant French Resistance thriller Army of Shadows and even the most reserved critics freaked out. Now the theater’s back with more: Melville’s earlier classic (from 1962) is a slick crime flick about a crooked police informer, played by the sly, understated Jean-Paul Belmondo, who sees an upside to every betrayal. This is a master class in the art of the double-cross—and may be the film-geek event of the season.

Everyone knows the French love Michael Moore, but this time around even Fox News is declaring his new documentary "brilliant and uplifting." And as for our own critic, well, David Edelstein says it’s Moore’s best film, “a documentary that mixes outrage, hope, and gonzo stunts in the right proportions” and that “poses profound questions about the connection between health care and work.” Did we mention that Fox News called it “brilliant and uplifting”?

The Water Taxi Beach Party kicks off its summer D.J. nights by importing just the guest to remind us that we’re a maritime city: Thomas channels the Balearic beat of the party island of Ibiza and the spacey disco of his native Norway's fjords. He may be known as the Chewbacca to his pal Lindstrom's Han Solo, but the guy does cosmic house—with its deep bass and heady flourishes—as well as anyone.

If you're among people who found, like Jerry Saltz, that the “Summer of Love” show doesn’t properly acknowledge the sixties’ turbulent politics, man, you may want to give the Whitney another chance: The curators have belatedly installed photos and other works dealing with protest. Some pieces (like those by Gordon Parks and Garry Winogrand) are roughly contemporaries of the hippie work; others are by younger artists (Sam Durant, Josephine Meckseper) nostalgic for their parents' revolution.

Darkness is sort of a given aesthetic in the art world, but that doesn’t mean it has to be tormented, foreboding, and overly conceptual. (We’re glancing in your direction, Violette.) Noonan’s sepia silk screens are a glimpse into an avant-garde filmmaker’s dreams—a Pop medium with an anti-Pop sentiment and approach. The artist, who recently showed at Paris’ Palais de Tokyo, is exhibiting his multi-paneled, two- and three-dimensional compositions here; see them before they fade to black next week.

When we saw the trailer for this film, we figured it for just another lame mouse ‘toon. But, as David Edelstein raves, “this is a high water mark for Pixar”—one that even tops Brad Bird’s earlier masterwork, The Incredibles. It’s funnier, for one. This ridiculous rodent does what Keaton, Chaplin, and the Stooges couldn’t: He racks up pratfalls and pranks at the speed of an overclocked microchip. And he never has to pause to catch his breath.